Advice requested Whirlpool Duet Sport Washing Machine "popped"

Oren posted for all of us...

Just think, they could throw ALL the wash in one industrial size washer and save bux over the smaller units. Have a party and ice cream.

Reply to
Tekkie®
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Hi Oren, Opening the door turned out to be easy.

In the WFW8410SW, Whirlpool duet Sport Washing Machine, there is a special pull tab for opening the door.

Here is a picture of it in my washing machine:

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Reply to
Danny DiAmico

Yeah. It was nice the door opened so easily with that pull tab made expressly for that purpose.

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All I needed to do was remove the lower panel, which contained this instruction manual, hidden inside:

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Then, there was this drain plug:

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Which, when loosened, leaked very little water (1/4 inch or so):

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Unfortunately, the drain plug broke in half when I twisted it out:

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So I will have to deal with that problem later.

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

That did the trick. F28. Communications Error. No other errors.

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Reply to
Danny DiAmico

Ah, you remember that rattler, you do. I wish I had a picture of her.

I have found a half dozen since, but now I know EXACTLY what to look for!

I almost got bit by the pool, bending over to clean out the pool pumps, but I catch them now and throw them about a mile away from a five gallon bucket so that they can live, but somewhere else.

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

I tried removing that panel, but they must have put the NSA wire tap there because I can't figure out how to remove that front panel yet.

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What I need to find are disassembly instructions for the Whirlpool WFW8410SW.

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

Why were the outlets and the lights on the same circuit?

We had power strips on the work benches that were turned on when you came in to work in the morning. It would have worked ther.

Reply to
Charles Bishop

I don't remember if it was one switch or two. I remember that the switch was just inside the doorway to the lab. So, it was usually turned on by the first person who entered the lab.

The lab itself had these long countertops down the length of the lab. At about eye level were the outlets. The caps we stuck in the outlets and I "do" remember the labs being dark when nobody was in there (even then, we were aware someone could be hurt but we didn't worry about it because we associated the darkness with nobody being in there). < yes, we were kids >

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

PS: Don't remind me the time we took nitric acid, as I recall, and poured it into beakers containing iodine crystals and then dried it with either ether or alcohol (as I recall) and then painted anything we wanted e.g., the chemistry lab countertops, with the wet (stable) nitrogen tri-iodide paste.

When that stuff dries, it's so unstable, even a fly landing on it will cause it to explode (little purple cloud bursts sporadically popping all over the place!).

< yes, we were kids once >
Reply to
Danny DiAmico

The recipe I used (and the only one I've heard of) uses ammonia as a source of nitrogen, not acid.

Mike.

Reply to
MJC

I could be remembering it wrong as it was a few decades ago. It was chem lab, so, there was everything available.

We may have used the nitric acid with the cotton balls ...

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

Yea, we formed a neighbourhood committee to inspect and periodically check on the water supply up here. After about six months of pumping, the one gray well turned out to be crystalline clear (for now), so, that's been fixed.

Meanwhile, we formed a mesh Internet network, and we cleaned entire hillsides of poison oak (see picture I just posted below from that last endeavor):

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We cleaned up the hillside of old washing machines and tires too!

And, you should see many thousands of Scotch Broom we pulled out after the last good drenching (the tap roots only come out when the ground is literally soaked).

So, um, yeah. We've been busy in the boonies of Silicon Valley.

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

On Wed, 27 Apr 2016 18:38:53 -0000 (UTC), Danny DiAmico wrote in

Well done. It's good to see that kind of community-based planning, cooperation and action.

Reply to
CRNG

Danny DiAmico posted for all of us...

Glad to hear the gray well water cleaned up. Was the real problem ever determined?

Reply to
Tekkie®

Thanks for all your advice; I think it's the Motor Control Unit (Whirlpool P/N 8540540).

If you skip to the bottom of this post, you'll see pictures of the burned board. Do you concur based on the photos below that it's the motor control board?

Why didn't the diagnostic test work then?

Anyway, after being totally unsuccessful at getting the Whirlpool duet sport WFW8410SW washing machine to diagnose anything other than F28 (which is apparently the same "communications error" as the infamous F11 that youtubers all deplore), I finally just took the whole thing apart.

The en133200 F11.126/980-214 EMI Noise Filter near where the power comes in seemed to be in good shape:

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The main computer control board (Whirlpool PN W10063510) also seemed to be in good shape on the bottom:

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And on the top:

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And even looking to the sides:

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But, the motor control board had "something" wrong with it based on what the plastic looked like:

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I don't know what actually burned yet:

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As the two capacitors seem to be intact:

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Here's one of the capacitors at a side view:

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And here's the other capacitor:

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This shows a burned trace on the MMU:

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And this shows a closeup of that:

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As does this show burnt components or traces:

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I don't think I can figure out, on my own, whether it's repairable (I suspect it's not - do you?).

So, at this point, if you have good pointers for where to buy a new Whirlpool motor control board (PN 8540540), I'd appreciate more advice now that it's pretty sure that it's the MCU and not the CCU.

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

The part number seems to be either 8540540 or AKO 706497-05 based on this sticker on the Whirlpool WFW8410SW motor control board.

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I wonder what caused the board to blow up? Notice this capacitor has a hole blown in it, for example:

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Do you think if I put in a new board, that it will also blow?

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

I'm sorry. From my experience with you guys, you *see things* I don't see when I show you pictures (remember the garage door frame rebuild?).

So, I wanted you to have the *biggest* pictures I could supply, so that you guys could zoom in.

As a courtesy to you all, who help me immensely, here are the shrunk pictures, in the order of most important to least important.

This is the motor control board (PN 8540540, also PN W10163007) for the Whirlpool Duet Sport WFW8410SW washing machine:

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Notice that traces are burnt:

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And that multiple surface-mount components have exploded:

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There is even a "bullet hole" in one of the flat devices, which, might not be a capacitor because it's labelled "R16" whereas the other capacitors have a "C" designation as per typical convention:

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I'm not sure if one of the huge electrolytic capacitors has blown or not, because the top isn't flat, but I don't know if it was flat to begin with:

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The other huge electrolytic capacitor seems OK though:

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The part number is clearly shown on this sticker (and a call to the official Whirlpool parts center (866-698-2538) confirms that the part number W10163007 and 8540540. (It's important to note that the part number is not W10205342, which is sometimes listed in the parts diagrams - that must be for a newer model?)

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I'll repost the shrunk pictures of the CPU board and the EMI filter separately, but they seem pristine so I don't think the problem is there (unless they caused the problem in the first place).

Let me know if these pictures need to be shrunk further as I do try to document everything not only so that you guys can help me, but also so that others benefit from each action we take.

PS: Where is Jeff Liebermann when you need him!

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

We did have rains here in California, as Jeff Liebermann would know, where the wind blew out the power in the mountains three time in one week.

So this was the *first* time the washer was started after the power went out multiple times!

And you are correct that the part I thought was a capacitor is not labelled with a C (as the rest of the caps are), but it's labelled R16, so, it's not a cap.

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The rest of the capacitors on the motor control board seem to be ok:

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But certainly some of the surface-mount components have fried:

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The good news is that the EMI suppression filter seems to be intact:

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And the main computer control board (CCU) seems to be in good shape:

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Nothing seems burnt on the CCU:

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So, now my goal is to see where the best place to get a used or rebuilt or new Motor Control Board (MCU) P/N W10163007 or PN 8540540 from:

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Reply to
Danny DiAmico

Thanks for the suggestion of a whole-house surge suppressor.

I do have a generator, which kicks in automatically as the power goes out here in California at least a dozen times a year (it's like living in a third world country).

I'm not even counting the times the power goes out for seconds, where the generator doesn't even kick in, or only kicks in for a few seconds, the power is that bad from PG&E.

So, the two-hundred dollar Amazon surge suppressor you listed looks reasonable (considering it would cost more than that to put MOVs on all the computers and electronic devices).

I wonder how it works if I buy that two-hundred dollar part:

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Or, if I buy the eighty-dollar part:

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Does the power company let me put it in myself?

Reply to
Danny DiAmico

We can never be sure, but what we did was hike downhill from the spot the 500 foot well was dug. We hiked about 500 feet below that house and then we dug into the hillside (it's public open space, so, we just dug without permission with our hands).

Since the hill is steep, there was only about six inches of top soil, which we kicked away with our boots, and we noticed that there was a wide expance of gray "mud" at that level.

When we stopped for a moment to survey the area, we belatedly noticed a "band" of no vegetation at about the same level, crossing the mountainside along the isocline.

Given that we kicked away the topsoil in a half dozen spots, where this band seems very localized (about 100 feet long and only about 6 feet to 15 feet in height), our *assumption* is that there is a band of mud that was mixed up with the Franciscan sediments 30 million (or so) years ago when the Pacific plate rammed into the edge of California.

So, what we *think* happened is that the well drillers simply hit that "puddle" of gray mud at about 500 feet and that it took months to pump all that mud out from the pocket that the drillers were obtaining the water from.

The funny thing is that just those two houses experienced that gray mud, which even the well drillers said was odd in our area, so, take everything we say with a grain of salt, but do realize there are a lot of engineers on this hell who have pondered this situation, so, that's the best we could have come up with.

BTW, the 100-foot long 15-feet wide bridge and treehouse was put on hold because the storms blew it down. But we rebuilt it, and we're starting to build the 16-foot-by-16-foot treehouse itself, but this time, we anchored 1/2 inch steel cables to hold the treehouse *above* the 100-foot long bridge (Jeff Liebermann is always welcome to visit and I'll show it to him since he lives near by).

If you want, I'll snap some pictures of the new setup, but, it will look really nice since it's 80 feet above the ground when it's all done. Right now, we have the 100-foot suspension bridge done, and we're starting on the treehouse itself, which is going to be floating above the suspension bridge about 75 feet from the hillside and about 25 feet from the anchor redwood and about

80 or so feet above the ground.
Reply to
Danny DiAmico

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